


come alive once more

by celestialfics



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, POV Second Person, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialfics/pseuds/celestialfics
Summary: The first time the two of you meet, you are young—young skinny boys raised off of the table scraps of the Great Depression, and it feels as though it’s you and him against the world right from the start.





	come alive once more

**Author's Note:**

> this ends before infinity war so if u wanna pretend infinity war and the next avengers movie don't happen then i am right along with you  
> second person pov makes me feel some type of way so i thought i'd give it a try for the first time in a long time. hope you enjoy <3
> 
> title from gimme twice by the royal concept

i.

The first time the two of you meet, you are young—young skinny boys raised off of the table scraps of the Great Depression, and it feels as though it’s you and him against the world right from the start.

You find out quickly that this boy has a fiery spirit and a body that doesn’t quite match. You pray for him nightly, long and hard, because he’s sick and your ma said that it’s the right thing to do. You don’t know if it’s enough, so you draw blood from the face of a boy you never met, and you do it for him. It scares the others off, and you recognize yourself as a protector.

(He tells you not to do that again, and you tell him not to pick fights. As it turns out, neither of you ever stop.)

So, you protect him, almost like it's what you are made for. Maybe it is. You protect him from neighborhood bullies and the meaner things that echo around the world as if it’s an enclosed chamber. And you try—you try but you never do manage to protect him from himself.

War swallows the world whole and it takes you and him along with it. You tell him the date you are to leave for basic training, and he gets this horrible look on his face. Like something's eating him from the inside.

Whatever it is, it's eating you, too.

Still, though, you leave. You leave and you don't come back for a long while, not until you are sufficiently shaped and molded into a sharpshooter in a government issued uniform. You’ve lost part of yourself to it, to the training and the sleepless nights. When you return, you worry you’ll be unrecognizable.

But of course he recognizes you—he could recognize you from just the sound of your voice and you, him. You have truly missed him sorely all the while you were gone. Seeing him again after months at basic is akin to a breath of fresh air, an oasis in the desert. You hug him so tightly he lets out a racketing kind of wheeze, and you remember—though you've never truly forgotten—he is sick. He has always been sick, and this war around you has no reverence for men like him, even if they have quick wits and a heart of gold like he does.

You hurt for him. You hurt for yourself. No one is left untouched by this plague of a fight.

When you ship out across the Atlantic, you cry. It's quiet and all to yourself, hidden where you know no one else will see. You think of him sitting alone in your shared apartment that isn't shared anymore, and somehow you know for certain that life is never, ever going to be the same again.

 

ii.

The next time you see him, you think it's a dream. You've dreamed it before, on this dirty operating table where the only way you can survive is to not think too hard about what's happening to you—where the only way you can survive is to come to terms with your steadily approaching date of death.

But he is there, really, despite any of your doubts. You reach out and touch him. He is... bigger. He's sturdy, and he is no longer sick. He holds you, for only a second, like nothing else matters in the world, but the world is stubbornly on fire and an explosion reminds him where you both are. He snaps back into focus; you are suddenly dragged onto your feet. It takes you a few steps to remember how to use them.

The rest of that night becomes a blur to you, a mix of adrenaline and confusion and pain and relief. You actually almost become convinced that you really are dreaming, until you're marching back to the American camp and you look over at him. You look over and you realize you never could have dreamed up anyone like him.

And so, for the following days that turn into weeks, you do what you've always done: you follow him into fights. There's such an innate sense of belonging between the two of you that life like this, as long as you're together, becomes a bit more bearable.

That isn't to say that it isn't still horrifying out there. War is war is war, and just because he is stronger now doesn't mean he is immune to the gore of it. The blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones scream at you to protect him from all of this, to shield him from doing the dirty work, to bear that weight so he can go on and still be whole once this is all over. He won't let you, and you don't know if that's because he thinks it's his turn to protect you or because he has always been a self sacrificing idiot. Either way, you're pissed about it, but maybe it's both and maybe you're a hypocrite.

And one day, when you fall hard and fast, hitting the ground with a force that should kill you, all you can think is that you're glad it wasn't him.

 

iii.

You don’t know how long it’s been when you see him next, but you do know that it’s been a long, horrid time and that you had forgotten him. When you remember, though—when you remember, you wonder how you ever could have forgotten.

And then they make you forget again.

 

iv.

You stand across from him and he begs, voice wavering, “Please don’t make me do this.”

You are completely still as you stare at him, face blank and mind blanker. You can’t understand why he’s so emotional or where you’ve seen him before. He looks at you with such big, pleading eyes, and then he sets his jaw.

Ultimately, he makes the first move, throwing his shield at you. And you fight him, because it’s what you were trained to do; it’s instinct but also indoctrinated into every fiber of your being. Even if you feel a thread pulling loose in the back of your brain, you fight and you do not stop—what it boils down to is that you know there’s something more to this, but you can’t quite reach it, and remembering somehow feels like having to really face what you’ve become. That’s why you deny it, and that’s why you fight and scream.

You don’t stop until he takes ahold of that loose thread and pulls it, hard. You freeze, suddenly aware of just what you’re doing to this person that your love for is larger than life itself. Even if you don’t have all the pieces of this puzzle, even if you don’t know just why, you know then that you love him.

He falls, and you watch him go down. You remember falling, decades ago, and you remember a hand—his—reaching out for you. In that moment, nothing else matters.

You feel in your soul that you must protect him, and so you jump after him.

 

v.

You leave him on the riverbank as soon as you see him breathe and know he will live. Why you leave, though—you need time to figure this all out on your own. It's not easy to leave him but it would be even harder to stay. You don't know what's happened to your captors, but if they’re still out there you're about to make damn sure that they never take you again. As sure as you are that he would try so hard protect you, you don't want him to have to.

You can get by on your own. So, you leave.

There's a whole exhibit for him at the Smithsonian, and you figure it's a good place to start on your path. "Best friends since childhood," the overarching narrator tells you, and the back of your throat feels tight. Why—why can't you remember? You know he is important to you; you feel it so deeply that there's no way it isn't true, and now you have been taught why. So, why won't the dots connect? You desperately want them to, but your mind is masked of a permanent kind of fog that distorts the full picture.

You buy a plain journal from a corner store someplace, and you cut a picture of him out of a magazine you'd bought along with it. You tuck the picture inside and bookmark it after you scribble his name down on the page opposite, and you write in the journal whenever you think you've remembered something. Sometimes, it's vague. Sometimes, you wonder if it's even a real memory or if it's just you aching to feel  _anything_.

There are a few things you are certain you remember—the most clear being falling and screaming, reaching and reaching for solace that you know won't come. Even after you hit the ground, the pain is far from over.

But you remember softer things, too. How he was smaller, how he tucked up against you in the winter when the heaters in your apartment went out. How he looked in that bar after you and the others had been rescued, all big and prepped into a uniform, hair slick. He was still him—reckless and so pretty—but he was also new, able to be the born leader he was meant to be. Able to protect the ones he wanted to protect.

Maybe you remember more than you realize, but maybe that scares you. You don't write these things in the journal, partly because you aren't sure they're true and partly because you aren't sure you can face what they could possibly mean if they  _are_  true. You aren't ready for that, or for the consequences exploring it might behold, but really, there’s no escape.

So, you hide. It's easy enough when you've been trained to blend in to your surroundings, wherever you are. You don't know who out there is looking for you, HYDRA or him or various governments of the world, or even if anyone is at all, but you aren't quite one to take chances. Not anymore.

Months melt into years like sugar in rain, and you've made some sort of life for yourself. You still keep your journal around, bookmarked to a picture of him, and you write in it less often now but you find yourself looking at that picture more frequently than you'd ever admit. It's become a bit worn on the bottom from the repetitive movement of your thumb back and forth across the page as you've held it over the years.

And one day, everything flips upside down in a heartbeat, because you are an easier target than you ever thought you were and you'd unintentionally let your guard down for too long.

It brings him to you before anything else, and the first thing he says to you is a question you've dreaded since you realized what it meant: "Do you remember me?"

And how can you tell him you remember the way he looked at you on nights before the war when you came home with alcohol on your breath and smoke on your clothes, like you'd spent the night out with ladies when you'd really been putting off telling him about your shipment date? How can you tell him that you remember his voice, all breathy and weary, when he and you were tucked into a hastily carved dug-out for the night during the war? How can you tell him that but also mention that you don't remember the important things, like how you celebrated any of his birthdays or his mother’s name or how you both met?

You can't, and so you say, "I read about you in a museum."

He sees right through you; of course he does. But your time with him is cut short because you're forced to do what you've always done: fight and run. Fight because there's no other way, and run because you never truly  _wanted_  to fight. Not then, and certainly not now.

But it always ends in a fight, doesn't it?

 

vi.

When the man interviewing you says the first word from that old leather book, you hate yourself. You hate yourself for being so easily controlled, so easily manipulated, so easily reverted into a machine. You pound on the confinement structure around you and you scream as your sanity slips back into trained numbness until there is none of you—none of what you'd remembered or what you'd built—left. You don't hate yourself, then, because there is nothing to hate and there is nothing to feel.

You again become what you have been for a majority of your life: a fatal whir of carefully placed punches and kicks, a gun in the right position, an enemy with a history. But right now, you don't have an explicit mission, so your brain defaults to  _get out of here_.

People keep coming at you, and you don't aim to kill. In this state of mind, you can hardly call it a choice, but it almost feels like one. All you want is to get out.

Of course,  _of course_ , after everything, he isn't going to let you disappear again. He holds you down with more than just his bare hands—he holds you with his willpower and his determination and his unwavering devotion to you. And when you fall everything goes black, but somehow you know he is right beside you.

 

vii.

You wake slowly with a horrible pounding in your head, and for a moment it feels as though you're in the middle of a war that's long over. But everything dawns on you as soon as you see your arm, metallic and lethal, pinned so that you cannot move. Everything comes back so quickly that you're not sure you would be able to move even if you weren't restrained.

For the first time in—in  _seventy years_ , you remember almost everything. You remember the name of the street you'd grown up on, and you remember his eighteenth birthday, when you'd gotten some cheap liquor and the both of you drank and danced and stayed up all night just so that it wouldn't have to be over.

You say his name and it tastes sweet, like pure sugar on your tongue.

"Which Bucky am I talking to?" he asks carefully, and this time, it's a question you don't dread.

"Your mom's name was Sarah," you answer immediately, because it feels the most important. And then you smile. It's a foreign feeling, but you smile as you say, "You used to wear newspapers in your shoes."

He smiles back at you and it's easy to forget for these few moments just what it is you're in the middle of. Because it’s  _you and him,_ really and truly, for the first time since you fell off that train.

Both of you are quickly reminded of the current situation, though, and you let out a long breath.

The world will never let you rest, and this you're sure of. You wonder, is this all you're good for? All you were destined to be? A pawn in a bigger man's fight, a fist and a gun and a mind that's too broken to be anything other than used and mistrusted?

Maybe that's true, but there's no way in hell that he'd ever let you think so. He fights for you like you are the blood in his veins, even if you never asked it of him. Even if you know you don't deserve it, he says you do.

You don't fight him, because you have and still would do the exact same for him.

And in the end, it's you that causes the strife. It's you who has again been an easy target, it's you who has been used and coerced and tortured, and it's you who has killed. Yet it's him that loses—he loses a friend and an ally, as well as his freedom and his status.

He's told you that it isn't your fault, that you were being controlled. But it doesn't actually change anything, does it? Because the hands were still your hands, and they are hands that he fights for, while they are hands that you cannot trust.

As much as he fights for you, as much as he risks for you, you  _cannot_ risk hurting him again. So you turn to ice, though ice has never been your friend. Ice has trapped you, ice has made its home casing your limbs. Ice again will hold you until you are needed, or until you are cured.

He looks at you all sad when you tell him because both of you have waited so long for one another, but as much as it hurts, there is no other way. Deep down, he must understand.

 

viii.

When you’re first led into the lab, you’re almost expecting a new arm, even though you’ve denied all the offers that’ve been made in the few days that you’ve been out of cryostasis. Instead, though, you're sat in front of a computer that makes a repetitive sound, almost like a phone ringing. You're about as confused as you have been most of the time since you stepped out of the cryo tank, but you trust by now that whatever's happening here is in your best interest.

So much is swiftly proved as his face lights up the screen, slightly blurry and completely breathtaking.

The corners of your mouth turn upwards, as do his, and you let out a slight, low chuckle. Neither of you speak for a long moment, but eventually you say, "Never would've dreamed of this back then, huh."

He laughs and agrees with you, before the both of you decide that you quite prefer the future—here, now—over the past, your pasts full of war and filth and secrets. You refrain from talking about it too much, but Wakandan tech really is a world ahead of anything you've ever seen before, and you're forever grateful for the work done on you that's solidified your memories and extracted HYDRA from your brain.

You voice as much to him, and after his initial burst of elation, he looks sad for a moment but covers it with a grin. It's almost hard to tell because of the video quality, but you're certain. When you inquire about it, he answers slowly: "Even when I had nothing, I had you." He pauses for a while, scrubbing his hand over some scruff he's neglected to shave. "But when  _you_ had nothing..."

"I had you," you answer for him immediately, because you can see the doubt in him through all the pixels and miles between the both of you. "I had you. Even if I didn't always know it, you were always there, alright?"

It takes some convincing for him to believe you, but you and him have always had that in common. You’ve both always been stubborn, and you’ve both always seen yourselves as somehow lesser than the other. You suppose it all comes down to loyalty, to utter commitment and in all, to admiration.

You suppose it all comes down to love.

 

ix.

It’s hardly a week and he’s here with you, hugging you on the tarmac. You’re on the precipice of being overwhelmed as he holds you close, almost completely collapsing into you and burying his face in the crook of your neck as the people around you look on.

You notice—and it’s so fleeting, you wonder later if it even happened at all—after he pulls away, he starts to lean slightly back towards you. The eyes on you and him seem to dawn on him all at once, so he clears his throat and lifts a hand to scratch at the back of his neck. He’s fresh off the plane—his gait as he had disembarked the aircraft transformed into more of a run as soon as he caught sight of you—and you can’t quite blame him for the tunnel vision. God knows you’ve been focused on him and nothing else for most of your free life.

And as soon as you’re both done with the formalities in the city, you’re left to your own devices. You show him around the land you’ve been tending, the goats you’ve been caring for, the hut you’ve been living in. He has this soft look on his face, corners of his lips pulled slightly upwards and eyes warm, all the while.

Somewhere along the way your hand and his found each other, pressed palm to palm and fingers intertwining. It’s easier than you’d ever expected it to be to do what you’ve always wanted—you turn to him and you kiss him.

You kiss him, he kisses you back, and years flicker like a stop motion film behind your eyelids. Beat up kids in Brooklyn turn into casualties of war, an assassin and a national hero fall together into the Potomac seventy years later, you fight each other and fight for each other and everything in between. It’s always been you and him.

You've both been through hell and back, and you both are too hard on yourselves. It's been you and him against the world right from the start, and it'll be you and him until the end of the line. So it's a wonder, really, that you've never said it aloud before.

You pull away, only about an inch. You can feel his breath on your lips. "Steve," you say, almost like a question.

He hums in response, eyes flickering between your own, half lidded.

“I’m in love with you.” When you say it, it feels too big for your mouth. It feels too big for the room. It feels too big to be said at all.

He smiles at you, that smile you and the rest of the country had fallen in love with a century earlier, and he kisses you again, and again, and again.

He kisses you until you’re both breathless, and he then echoes back to you, low and rough: “I’m in love with you.”

And you think that one of the only things you've done right in your whole damn life is love Steve Rogers. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/liquidsaints) & [tumblr](http://liquidsaints.tumblr.com/)
> 
> thanks for reading! <3


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